education, neoliberal culture and the brain

[xchrom]

http://www.nationofchange.org/education-neoliberal-culture-and-brain-1373724377

***SNIP

My sense is that the most insidious, influential and largely unacknowledged of these belief systems is neoliberal capitalist ideology. That is, the critical missing piece in this lively and rapidly proliferating conversation about empathy is the failure to identify the dynamic convergence of of culture, politics and the brain, what the eminent political theorist William Connolly once describes as neuropolitics or the “politics through which cultural life mixes into the composition of the body/brain process. And vice versa.”

As applied here, this explanation corresponds to what the French philosopher Catherine Malebou has termed “neural ideology,” the brain’s plasticity conforming to the social and political organization of contemporary corporate capitalism. For me, the most pertinent questions remain: how does this cultural information gain access to the brain and what are the implications for understanding the neuropolitics of empathy?

For example, Dissident Voice readers are familiar with research showing that empathic concern among college students is strikingly lower than their 1970s counterparts and the decline has been especially notable since 2000. But it’s far from my intent to single out undergraduates for special censure.

It can’t be emphasized too strongly that all brains are basically alike, with the same equipment,but differing cultural experiences contribute to shaping our brains, to how we think,including how we think about empathy. Here I’m mindful not to caricature Donald Hebb’s rule that “The neurons that fire together wire together,” but his emphasis on the roles of repetition and synoptic plasticity draws our attention to the critical role of culture’s neurobiological imprinting.

[pampango]

1. Great article. Thanks for posting, xchrom.

... our dominant empathy-anesthetizing, neoliberal culture has become the “public pedagogy” that brackets off feelings of social solidarity across the globe.

If an empathy deficit is more apparent among undergraduates it’s because they are the legacy of over three decades of unrelenting exposure to our neoliberal ideology of unfettered greed and capitalism’s dominant narrative about human nature. Freedom has been reduced to the pursuit of economic self-realization and the “self,” a hyper-competitive, perpetual consumer, largely indifferent to the fate of others and comfortable with the commodification of morals. This cultural construction of the self is based primarily on market values, leaving selective moral amnesia in its wake.

Studies on the evolutionary and biological origins of empathy are ongoing but we now have hard empirical evidence , not wishful thinking or even logical inference, on behalf of a case for organizing vastly better societies. There is sufficient evidence that our potential for empathic engagement is being subverted by the dominant economic system and its ideology.

If an ethos of caring is an essential part of what it means to be human and an elemental requirement for human happiness, then empathically impaired societies must be found wanting and challenged. The tacit decision by neuroscholars to ignore or exclude this hypothesis from the research agenda, debate and conversation on empathy is inexcusable but not wholly unexpected.

There are many Western (and non-Western) societies which display much more 'social solidarity' and are not as 'empathetically impaired' as our own. For better or worse the existing culture strongly influences how our brains develop and, therefore, tend to perpetuate it.

This article provides some valuable insight into how this happens.

[xchrom]

3. ...

***perhaps this was the wrong day to post this...however there is also something there that makes it exactly right.

[Catherina]

4. Thank you both. Rec'd n/t

[rrneck]

6. Oops, wrong spot.

You can't empathize with people if you don't see people.

[marmar]

2. k/r. Good stuff.

[snot]

5. K&R'd.

[rrneck]

7. Good stuff. Best I've seen lately. Thanks. nt

[limpyhobbler]

8. K&R

I highlighted this

There is sufficient evidence that our potential for empathic engagement is being subverted by the dominant economic system and its ideology.

and this

The tacit decision by neuroscholars to ignore or exclude this hypothesis from the research agenda, debate and conversation on empathy is inexcusable but not wholly unexpected.